Following last week’s interview with Saša Jurić, we are bringing you another one, this time by no other than Bozhidar Batsov. Bozhidar will be talking to us about: Clojure: The Bad Parts.
Tell us a bit about yourself?
I’m the maintainer of CIDER and the editor of the community Clojure style guide. Most people would probably describe me as an Emacs zealot (and they would be right). I’m also quite fond of Unix-like operating systems, the Lisp family of languages, functional programming in general and Clojure in particular.
I’ve been programming professionally for 12 years and throughout my career I’ve been using over a dozen programming languages. Currently I work at Toptal, shaping up the future of work.
Believe it or not, I have hobbies and interests outside the realm of computers, but I won’t bore with those here.
How did you get into programming?
When I was little I wanted to play computer games and the only way I could convince my parents to buy me a computer (which they considered an expensive toy) was to lie to them I needed it to be become a programmer. I enrolled in a CS major in high-school to make them believe me, got my first computer and the rest is history. I didn’t really enjoy programming at first, but over time it grew on me. Especially after I starting hacking with languages like Ruby and Common Lisp.
How did you get into functional programming?
A former boss of my was preaching all the time about the might and magic of Common Lisp. He got me interested in Lisp and eventually I got interested in functional programming. Scala, Haskell and Clojure played a big part in making me an FP believer. Together with an ever growing frustration with big complected systems built using OO languages.
Why that tech?
It’s a Lisp with which you can actually build something useful and practical. And it’s modern! And it’s under active development! And it’s pushing the boundaries every day!
Why that talk?
Because no one is perfect and there’s always an opportunity for improvement. And because it’s a topic avoided by most Clojure developers.
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Thank you Bozhidar for the interview! Stay tuned for next week, when we’ll be posting more interview from our speakers. As always, Partial tickets are available on our website.
